Questions for the Porcupine

Posted on January 25, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Porcupine,
do the sapless twigs of winter
taste any different on the tree
you’ve just girdled,
this waste of a pine?
Its whited branches light
the grove like candles,
like candelsticks.
But you with your poor eyesight
must favor the dark: hollows & cavities,
the undersides of things,
unchewed bark.
This pine was unwise to arm itself
with such soft & succulent spines.
It did nothing but hiss
like a gnawed-on road-salted tire.
Slow destroyer,
do you ever pass
those bleached roads in the air
& long for salt?

Download the MP3

About Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with one quadrillion of his closest microbial friends --- a tight-knit, symbiotic community comprising some 500 different species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa.
This entry was posted in Audio, Poems & poem-like things, Trees and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

9 Responses to Questions for the Porcupine

  1. Jo says:
    January 26, 2009 at 6:59 am

    Love it *grin*.

  2. Beth Westmark says:
    January 26, 2009 at 1:37 pm

    I enjoyed the audio. Am trying to recall where Buck & I were hiking when we saw the trees gnawed into pencil points.

  3. Dick says:
    January 27, 2009 at 1:59 am

    A fine poem, much enhanced in the reading. Shades of Ferlinghetti in the vocalisation, I thought.

  4. Beth W. says:
    January 27, 2009 at 7:16 am

    Dave,

    I should never comment on a post in the evening after drinking whiskey. Those “pencil point” trees were from beavers — not porcupines. Good grief.

    By the way, I just watched your “bear on a unicycle” in the tree. Fantastic. I have gone way out on a limb for much less reward. . .

    Beth

  5. Dave says:
    January 27, 2009 at 10:04 am

    Thanks, all.

    Beth, thanks for bringing up (albeit inadvertently) the beaver comparison, which I didn’t even think of. And I’m rather flattered to think of readers enjoying a fine whiskey while they peruse the blog.

  6. Pam Hart says:
    January 27, 2009 at 4:41 pm

    Dave, I like the hidden and off rhymes in your poem — and esp. its narrow lines, like a quill. And thanks for visiting A Walk around the Lake (not park…oops)!

  7. Rachel Barenblat says:
    January 28, 2009 at 7:28 pm

    You didn’t divide this one into into quatrains, per se, but I like the last two quatrains an awful lot.

  8. Dave says:
    January 29, 2009 at 7:50 am

    Hi Pam – Thanks for the comment, and sorry I messed up the name of your blog in the smorgasblog! (There’s another blog in my feed reader called Once Around the Park, and I mixed them up.) Yeah, I experimented with even shorter lines, but since that’s not the way I’d conceived the poem in the first place, it just didn’t work.

    Rachel – Thanks. You mean from “This pine” on? I agree that’s the strongest part of the poem. Altogether, the poem might be a little too concept-heavy, like something out of the 17th century.

  9. Rana says:
    January 29, 2009 at 10:17 am

    The blending of earlier sensibilities and modern form is part of why I like this!